Photography by theonlydeadheadinthehameau

Before & After: Petra

Petra is arguably one of the most photographed places on Earth (right up there with Venice) and I’ve posted a number of the pictures I took there on this blog. And here’s another, which I’ve used for this latest exercise in ‘before and after’.

Before

The original is a pretty bog-standatd shot of part of the famous al-Khazneh (Treasury) building which is the first thing you see when you enter Petra. As it stands it’s pretty ho-hum – the photo, not the Treasury – but I thought it might be possible to make something a little more arresting with some post-processing.

After

The first thing to do was straighten the image. After that, I cropped out the grey rock on the left, to focus on the juxtaposition of the angular and circular features (which I thought contrasted well with each other).

The original image seemed to me to be a little over-exposed, so I adjusted for that in the whole image. A particular problem area was the dome on top of the circular feature. I brought out some additional detail in that by adding a graduated filter on the right hand side of the image – an innovation for me: I knew Lightroom offered such a thing but had never worked out how to use it. I got it eventually through trial and error.

After that, it was simply a matter of adding some Punch and Sharpening to give the image a bit more ‘presence’. Overall, I think the editing has made for an improvement.